The Story of Joan of Arc

CHAPTER XVIII. THE END OF THE MAID

THEY burned her cruelly to death in the market-place of Rouen, with eight hundred soldiers round the stake, lest any should attempt to save her. They had put a false accusation on a paper cap, and set it on her head: it was written that she was "Heretic, Relapsed, Apostate, Idolatress." This was her reward for the bravest and best life that was ever lived.

She came to her own and her own received her not.

There was with her a priest who pitied her, not one of her Judges – Brother Isambert de la Pierre, of the order of St. Augustine. Joan asked him to bring her a cross, and to hold it up before her eyes while she was burning. "Saith moreover that while she was in the fire she ceased never to call loudly on the Holy Name of Jesus; always, too, imploring: ceaselessly the help of the Saints in Paradise; and more, when the end was now come, she bowed her head, and gave up her spirit, calling on the name of Jesus."

The Saints had said to her, long before: "Bear your torment lightly: thence shall you come into the kingdom of Paradise."

So died Joan the Maid.

It is said by some who were present, that even the English Cardinal, Beaufort, wept when he saw the Maid die: "crocodiles' tears!" One of the secretaries of Henry VI. (who himself was only a little boy) said, "We are all lost. We have burned a Saint!"

They were all lost. The curse of their cruelty did not depart from them. Driven by the French and Scots from province to province, and from town to town, the English returned home, tore and rent each other; murdering their princes and nobles on the scaffold, and slaying them as prisoners of war on the field; and stabbing and smothering them in chambers of the Tower; York and Lancaster devouring each other; the man Henry VI. was driven from home to wander by the waves at St. Andrews, before he wandered back to England and the dagger stroke-these things were the reward the English won, after they had burned a Saint, they ate the bread and drank the cup of their own greed and cruelty all through the Wars of the Roses. They brought shame upon their name which Time can never wash away; they did the Devil's work, and took the Devil's wages. Soon Henry VIII. was butchering his wives and burning Catholics and Protestants, now one, now the other, as the humour seized him.

Joan had said to the Archbishop, at Rheims, that she knew not where she would die, or where she would be buried. Her ashes were never laid in the earth; she had no grave. The English, that men might forget her, threw her ashes into the sea. There remains no relic of Joan of Arc; no portrait, nothing she ever wore, no cup or sword or jewel that she ever touched. But she is not forgotten; she never will be forgotten. On every Eighth of May, the day when she turned the tide of English conquest, a procession in her honour goes through the streets of Orleans, the city that she saved; and though the Protestants, at the Reformation, destroyed her statue that knelt before the Fair Cross on the bridge, she has statues in many of the towns in France. She was driven from the gate of Paris, but near the place where she lay wounded in the ditch, is her statue, showing her on horseback, in armour.

CHAPTER XIX. THE SECOND TRIAL OF THE MAID

THE rich and the strong had not paid a franc, or drawn a sword to ransom or to rescue Joan. The poor had prayed for her, and the written prayers which they used may still be seen. Probably the others would have been glad to let Joan's memory perish, but to do this was not convenient. If Joan had been a witch, a heretic, an impostor, an apostate, as was declared in her condemnation, then the King had won his battles by the help of a heretic and a witch. Twenty years after Joan's martyrdom, when the King had recovered Normandy and Rouen, he thought it time to take care of his own character, and to inquire into the charges on which she was found guilty. It is fair to say that he could not do this properly till he was master of Rouen, the place at which she was tried. Some of the people concerned were asked questions, such as the good clerk, Manchon, and Deaupèrc, one of the Judges. He was a man of some sense: he did not think that Joan was a witch, but that she was a fanciful girl, who thought that she saw Saints and heard Voices, when she neither saw nor heard anything. Many mad people hear Voices which are also mad; Joan's Voices were perfectly sane and wise, and told her things that she could not have known of herself.

Not much came of this examination, but, two years later, Joan's mother and brothers prayed for a new trial to clear the character of the family. It is the most extraordinary thing that, up to this year, 1452, Joan's brothers and cousins seem to have been living, on the best terms, with the woman who pretended to be Joan, and said that she had not been burned, but had escaped. This was a jolly kind of woman, fond of eating and drinking and playing tennis.

Why Joan's brothers and cousins continued to be friendly with her after the King found her out, because she did not know his secret, is the greatest of puzzles, for she was a detected impostor, and no money could be got from the connection with her. Another very amazing thing is that, in 1436, an aunt of the Duke of Burgundy, Madame de Luxembourg, entertained the impostor, while the whole town of Orleans welcomed her, and made her presents, and ceased holding a religious service on the day of Joan's death, for here, they said, she was, quite well and merry! Moreover the town's books of accounts, at Orleans, show that they paid a pension to Joan's mother as "Mother of the Maid," till 1452, when they say "Mother of the late Maid." For now, as Joan's family were trying to have her character cleared, they admitted that she was dead, burned to death in 1431, as, of course, she really was. There are not many things more curious than this story of the False Maid.

However, at last Joan's family gave up the impostor, and, five years later, she was imprisoned, and let out again, and that is the last we hear of her. The new Trial lingered on, was begun, and put off, and begun again in 1455. Cauchon was dead by this time; nothing could be done to him. Scores of witnesses came and told the stories given at the beginning of this book, showing how Joan was the best and most religious of girls, and very kind to people even more poor than herself, and very industrious in knitting and sewing and helping her mother. Every one who was still alive, that had known her in the wars, came, like d'Alençon, and Dunois, and d'Aulon, and her confessor: and many others came, and told about Joan in the wars, how brave she was and modest, and the stories of what she had suffered in prison, and about the unfairness of her trial, were repeated.

The end was that the Court of Inquiry-declared her trial to have been full of unlawfulness and cruelty, and they abolished the sentence against her and took off all the shameful reproaches, and ordered a beautiful cross to be erected to her memory in the place where she was burned to death.

So here ends the story of the Life and Death of Joan the Maid.